If
I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th
century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels
would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom.
Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things
happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment,
rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who
were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society
forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage
something they had never had to manage before--free time.

We're going to
look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user
has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a
canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little
bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we
make a good thing happen?"